The failure of a legislative committee to fully support meaningful forestry reform is a blunder of significant consequences. Considering what they finally produced, committee members could have saved everyone time by simply sending an invitation to environmentalist Jonathan Carter to get his referendum machine cranked up again.

It was important for the Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry Committee to have put something of substance together, and doing so was within its grasp. Industry, publicly anyway, backed the Compact for Maine’s Forests. Environmentalists made lawmakers’ jobs easier by getting together (Mr. Carter included) and proposing a simplified but tougher version of the Compact. Property-rights advocates made their concerns clear from the beginning — that’s one reason that all landowners with fewer than 100,000 acres were largely exempted from the environmentalists’ plan.

The difference between the Compact and the tougher bill was so narrow you couldn’t slip a sapling between the two. Both proposed an audit program — would it be voluntary or mandatory? Both excluded clearcutting unless “silviculturally justified” — how is that going to be defined? Both called for sustainability — the challenge was to agree on what that meant. All of these are points for negotiation. That’s why the Legislature is there — to negotiate, so the state does not have to endure another frustrating referendum question that cannot be amended once printed.

Instead, the committee gave Maine blather. More study committees. More reviews and surveys and talking in circles. It gave anyone convinced that large landowners are overcutting a prime reason to launch another referendum drive. Who could blame them?

Maine does not need another task force to talk about sustainability. Right under their industry press releases, lawmakers on the committee have something called the “Principles of Sustainability,” produced in 1994 by the Northern Forest Lands Council, a group that consisted of members of government, industry and environmental groups.

Gov. Angus King liked the principles so much that in 1995 he formed his own committee, called the Council on Sustainable Forest Management, which was charged with establishing benchmarks to carry out the earlier work. Its conclusions, too, are no doubt buried under lawmakers’ papers. Why spend another eight years, as the forestry committee’s majority report recommends, gathering and implementing similar information?

This is a stalling tactic to do as little as possible for as long as possible. Think the folks who make a living by starting referendums are going to wait? Forget about it.

The environmentalists’ proposal, modified a bit as LD 1766, has been reported out of committee with only three supporters. Lawmakers who would prefer to see this issue settled in the Legislature rather than through television ads need to support this bill. They need to persuade colleagues that this is their last chance to avoid going through another couple of years of bumper-sticker arguments over the complex issue of forestry.

But time is rapidly running out.